Audi and Nvidia to bring AI-based driverless car to road by 2020

Audi and Nvidia say their AI-powered driverless car will be on the road within three years. Image: Dean Bertoncelj/Shutterstock

Audi and Nvidia are collaborating on their own self-driving car that will have AI at its core, hitting roads in 2020.

The news comes just a day after BMW, Intel and Mobileye revealed that 40 driverless cars will be on the streets of Europe and the US in the second half of 2017.

At CES 2017, the president of Audi of America, Scott Keogh, showed off the new Audi Q7, which is able to drive itself after just four days of training.

‘What we thought was science fiction is coming true as we speak’– JEN-HSUN HUANG

This is thanks to Nvidia’s new Xavier AI supercomputer for cars.

Nvidia and Audi have been working together for 10 years now and Audi was the first car company to exhibit at CES seven years ago.

The Xavier supercomputer consists of 512 GPU cores, an 8-core CPU architecture and a new computer vision accelerator, capable of delivering 20trn operations per second of performance.

AI gets serious: No longer just a game

Nvidia also revealed its AI CoPilot software assistant, which uses data from sensors to build awareness of what’s happening inside and outside the car; such as spotting pedestrians and other vehicles, and alerting human drivers to respond accordingly.

In a keynote at CES, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that computer vision, artificial intelligence and virtual reality are coming more and more to the fore and will feature in more real-world applications than just gaming.

“These achievements were impossible until just a few years ago.

“We are going through, unquestionably, the most exciting time in tech. What we thought was science fiction is coming true as we speak.”